her unmanageable looks and demeanor, to the position of being the “functional First Lady of the United States.” Nuzzi also wrote about Hope Hicks twice: the first piece, for GQ in 2016, was called “The Mystifying Triumph of Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s Right-Hand Woman,” and detailed how a “person who’d never worked in politics had nonetheless become the most improbably important operative in this election.” The second piece came out in New York after Hicks resigned in early 2018. Nuzzi painted her both as a woman utterly in charge of her own destiny and a sweet, innocent, vulnerable handmaiden to an institution that was falling apart.
The media conversation around the women of the Trump administration has been conflicted to the point of meaninglessness. They have benefited from the pop-feminist reflex of honoring women for achieving visibility and power, no matter how they did so. (The situation was perfectly encapsulated by Reductress’s 2015 blog post “New Movie Has Women in It.”) What began as a liberal tendency now brings conservative figures into its orbit. In 2018, Gina Haspel, the CIA official who oversaw torture at a black site in Thailand and then destroyed the evidence, was nominated to be director of the agency—the first woman to hold this office. Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.” Many other conservatives echoed this view, with varying degrees of sincerity. There’s a joke that’s circulated for the past few years: leftists say abolish prisons, liberals say hire more women guards. Now plenty of conservatives, having clocked feminism’s palatability, say hire more women guards, too.
The Trump administration is so baldly anti-woman that the women within it have been regularly scanned and criticized for their complicity, as well as for their empty references to feminism. (It’s arguable that we could understand the institution of celebrity itself as similarly suspicious: despite the prevailing liberalism of Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance, aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an inherently conservative way.) But the Trump women have also been defended and rewritten along difficult-women lines. Melania merely wearing a black dress and a veil to the Vatican, looking vaguely widowy, was enough to prompt an onslaught of yes-bitch jokes about dressing for the job you want. The Times ran a column on Melania’s “quiet radicalism,” in which the writer assessed Melania as “defiant in her silence.” When Melania boarded a plane to Houston in the middle of Hurricane Harvey wearing black stiletto heels, she was immediately slammed for this tone-deaf choice, and then defended on the terms of feminism: it was shallow and anti-woman to comment on her choice of footwear—she has the right to wear whatever sort of shoes she wants.
By 2018, the Trump administration was weaponizing this predictable press cycle. In the midst of the outrage about family separation at the southern border, Melania boarded a plane to visit the caged children in Texas wearing a Zara jacket emblazoned with the instantly infamous slogan “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” It was a transparent act of trolling: a sociopathic message, delivered in the hopes of drawing criticism of Melania, which could then be identified as sexist criticism, so that the discussion about sexism could distract from the far more important matters at hand.
And, because of the feminist cultural reflex to protect women from criticism that invokes their bodies or choices or personal presentation in any way, the Trump administration was also able to rely on liberal women to defend them. In 2017, a jarring, loaded image of Kellyanne Conway began making the rounds on the internet: she appeared to be barefoot, with her legs spread apart, kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office in a room full of men. This was a gathering of administrators from historically black colleges—black men in suits, conducting themselves with buttoned-up propriety, while Conway acted as if the Oval Office were the family TV room. There was an uproar about this general unseemliness, which was immediately followed by full-throated defenses of Conway, including a tweet by Chelsea Clinton. Vogue then wrote that Chelsea’s gesture of support was “a model for how feminists should respond to powerful women being demeaned and diminished on the basis of their gender,” and that this was a “great way to beat Conway and other ‘postfeminist’ political operatives at their own game.” Conway “wins,” Vogue wrote, when people point